A Modern Flood Barrier Aims to Protect Verizon’s Landmark Building

A portable flood barrier at the Verizon switching center in Lower Manhattan.Credit
Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

To protect their Manhattan settlement in the 17th century, the Dutch built a wall.

To protect Wall Street in the 21st century, Verizon is doing much the same thing.

Passers-by have been startled this week by the sight of a nine-foot-high wall standing in front of the company’s switching center at 140 West Street, across Vesey Street from 1 World Trade Center. This wall was intended to defend against floodwaters. Segments of it were being tested. Made of steel posts and aluminum planks, the removable barrier would look like a heavy-duty storefront security shutter about 1,000 feet long if it were completely installed.

But it has not been designed to win aesthetic awards. It has been designed to protect Verizon equipment, electronics, cables and conduits from inundation. Four of the five subbasements at 140 West Street were immersed during Hurricane Sandy. Tanks storing fuel for the emergency generators were submerged.

The catastrophe at 140 West Street, crucial for providing communication services for the New York Stock Exchange and other downtown financial giants, added to the disruption caused by the storm. It also left Verizon with a $35 million cleanup and repair tab, including the restoration of the lobby murals in the building, which is a designated landmark.

So it happened — by coincidence, Verizon executives said — that on the first anniversary of the hurricane’s arrival, the company was testing the installation of what is supposed to be a nearly impermeable flood barrier, no matter how fundamentally the climate may be changing.

“We follow the science and act accordingly,” said John M. Vazquez, the senior vice president of Verizon for global real estate, human resources and administration.

Photo

The barrier is designed to withstand a flood surge like the one caused by Hurricane Sandy.Credit
Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

James M. Callahan, an engineer and a vice president of Arcadis, which designed the barrier, said the wall’s height was determined by the six-foot flooding that can be expected during a 100-year storm, plus two feet for storm surge, plus one foot to account for the anticipated rise of sea levels by 2050.

The wall was fabricated, largely in North Dakota and Ohio, by Flood Control America. Verizon executives would not disclose its cost.

What is impressive about Verizon’s response to Hurricane Sandy is its self-interested timeliness. Last year’s storm has spawned enough studies, reports, projections, white papers and news releases to fill a few hundred sandbags.

As critical as long-term planning is, however, the question remains, what would happen if New York were hit by another such storm sooner rather than later?

This is what would happen at 140 West Street:

Most of the year, there will be almost no evidence of the wall except for footings that will be flush with the sidewalk. If the city’s Office of Emergency Management says that a distant storm may have destructive potential, Verizon will pull the barrier out of storage in South Plainfield, N.J. The numbered parts are to be kept in four big containers, one for each side of the building, on West, Barclay, Washington and Vesey Streets.

Over two or three days, the company will install the steel framework around the building. This consists of vertical steel posts and 45-degree steel braces. The posts will be bolted into the permanent footings and braced against the building by steel plates faced in rubber.

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A section of the flood barrier Verizon will be available for use in Lower Manhattan.Credit
Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

The wall will have 49 bays. In every bay, a dozen horizontal aluminum planks, each nine inches high, can be stacked up to form a solid barrier. The planks vary in length from 15 to 27 feet. They are notched top and bottom to nest in one another. The bottom of each plank is lined in a rubber gasket to create a virtually watertight seal.

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If the storm’s trajectory dictates evacuation, Verizon would fill the remaining bays with planks, leaving 140 West Street behind a dam. Two staircases would be installed to allow employees to get over the wall without having to scale it.

A small amount of leakage is expected through the wall, but sump pumps on the inner side will keep the space between barrier and building from becoming a moat.

Besides protecting equipment, the wall ought to offer some sense of security to the prospective occupants of condominium apartments planned in the upper 22 floors of the 31-story building by Benjamin Shaoul, of the Magnum Real Estate Group.

“Although a storm of Sandy’s magnitude is very rare,” Mr. Shaoul said in an email, “we want to ensure our buyers that we’ve taken every precaution.”

Correction: November 6, 2013

The Building Blocks column on Thursday, about a wall that Verizon is building downtown to defend its equipment against floodwaters, misidentified the settler group who built the original wall in Lower Manhattan. It was the Dutch, not the English.

A version of this article appears in print on October 31, 2013, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: A Modern Flood Barrier Aims to Protect Verizon’s Landmark Building. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe